Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

by Elaine Pagels

none of the narratives now called “gospels” were written during Jesus’s lifetime. Instead, they were written anonymously, some forty to sixty years after his death. What I thought were their authors’ names had been added about a hundred years after they were written, when admirers of these particular “gospels” added names familiar from Jesus’s inner circle, to lend them credence.

although historians have sought for millennia to verify details of these stories, they have found none—none for Matthew’s claim of an unusual astronomical sign; none for any historical record that hints at a massive slaughter of Jewish babies; and none to validate Luke’s claim that Jesus’s family would have had to pay Roman taxes in Bethlehem.

Nevertheless, nearly all historians agree that the unprecedented mass killing that Matthew claims to report could not have occurred without any trace remaining in Jewish or Roman historical records.

Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives, then, likely contain more literary adaptation of Hebrew Bible stories than history.

speculated that Joseph is not a historical figure. He suggests instead that Matthew may have patterned what he writes of Joseph’s receiving messages from angels in his dreams on the Hebrew Bible story of Joseph “the dreamer,”

Jesus’s own neighbors saw him only as a local workman, and his mother as a woman who had many children—five sons, as well as several daughters not regarded as important enough to name—and no father in sight

she conceived him with a lover who was not even Jewish—a Roman soldier named Panthera

Jesus had learned magic in Egypt, having tattoos on his body, as magicians were known to do, indicating that he had undergone magic initiations, and knew spells.

“Our stories of Jesus often sound just like the myths often told of the gods.”

modeled his narrative of Jesus’s birth on the story of Moses.

Greek speakers translated it as pneuma, a word gendered neuter—effectively, however, erasing the vision of divine Mother, an interpretation of the Holy Spirit,

A powerful healer, especially one who, like Jesus, charged no money, would have been in great demand.

that Jesus’s compassionate response helped sick people recover from “illness,” which he defines as “the social isolation and rejection” that they often suffer, thus better enabling them to cope with disease, and perhaps find powers of self-healing.

This dramatic scene anticipates how the Lord will drive out the Roman soldiers and destroy them, just as, in Moses’s time, the Lord drove the Egyptian army into the Red Sea to drown.

Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries would recognize the “Son of Man” instead as a figure—human